AG Participation follow-up

Hello,



During the June 21st AGWG call the working group was asked to participate in an exercise of categorizing existing WCAG 3.0 success criteria. About half the group participated in this exercise, for which we (the AG chairs) want to thank you. Notably, we observed that about half the participants on that week’s call did not attempt the exercise, neither during the time reserved for it on the call or afterwards. We spoke to this during this week’s AGWG call (June 28th), and it resulted in a number of questions and comments afterwards. As a result, we want to follow up to better explain what we meant.


As part of moving our efforts more towards WCAG 3.0, the AGWG chairs feel it is important that the group change from a group that spends most of its time fine-tuning, to one focused on rapidly developing new ideas and delivering content in support of those ideas. We intend that for the next charter, all active participants will be involved in subgroups. Meeting time will place emphasis on presenting and building a shared understanding of proposals. Critiquing and fine-tuning those proposals will shift to other asynchronous mechanisms.


We discussed minimum time commitments at the meeting and took an action to follow up with you. Previous charters set an expectation of 4 hours but our current charter has no minimum time commitment for participants. The chairs believe that subgroup participants should have about 4 hours per week available to meet and work, to ensure the productivity of subgroup. See the Subgoup Handbook<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_caRiZaTQDmsd2Vq415sz4AIullNse-GeGtohUfg_5M/edit?usp=sharing> for more on subgroups.


Our plan is that everyone who regularly attends AGWG meetings participates in multiple subgroups throughout the year. Based on the time needed, we expect participants will only be in one subgroup at a time. We also understand that there will be gaps in participation due to personal and professional commitments.


We need active participation in order to publish WCAG 3 in a reasonable time frame. The AG chairs will track who participates in subgroup work, as well as exploratory and writing exercises during calls, in order to:

  *   Ensure that no individual is “spread too thin,”
  *   Create a more productive and less exclusionary culture, and
  *   Better estimate AGWG’s workload and bandwidth.


We want to emphasize that everyone’s feedback and thoughts are welcome. What will change is that some comments and thoughts will be considered outside of AGWG calls through other asynchronous methods, to better focus our productivity within our meetings. Various other mechanisms exist for providing feedback, and we will increasingly steer the AGWG towards using those mechanisms, so that calls can be used for knowledge sharing, brainstorming, and other exercises needed to develop WCAG 3.0.


Lastly, we want to let you all know that if you have any questions, concerns, suggestions, or if at any point you experience difficulties joining, contributing to, or participating in any of our meetings to please contact us at group-ag-chairs@w3.org. We received feedback on how to better support participants engaging in exercises and will be trying that out over the next few months.



We want your participation, and we will work with you to help you find out how you can best contribute.


Kind regards,


The AG chairs


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Rachael Bradley Montgomery, PhD
Digital Accessibility Architect
Library of Congress
Email: rmontgomery@loc.gov<mailto:rmontgomery@loc.gov>